Apple dropping codec support…repercussions

[Gary Huff]

Seriously guys, codec is a portmanteau, not a damn acronym.

[Shawn Miller]

[Tod Hopkins] “And now Linux. My current production is video delivered via a Unity application running on Linux.”

That sounds interesting, what are you doing?

Shawn

[Tod Hopkins]

These are oral history exhibits for the National Museum of the Marine Corps. The clips are running in a simple interactive interface built in Unity and running on Ubuntu Linux. Historically such an exhibit would run on Windows, but Windows has always been hard to keep stable in fixed exhibits and Windows 10 introduced new problems for which no one had solutions, so we decided to work with Linux.

The scales may have tipped in favor of Linux for long-term fixed installations like this, but the jury is still out. I am not entirely happy with the performance of the h.264 video in the application (Unity Media Player). Playing in VLC or Ubuntu looks fine. Within the app we are dropping some frames. It’s a bit of a puzzle why UMP is not working as well as VLC or Ubuntu since all the apps leverage FFMPEG.

Cheers,
tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC

[Shawn Miller]

[Tod Hopkins] “These are oral history exhibits for the National Museum of the Marine Corps. The clips are running in a simple interactive interface built in Unity and running on Ubuntu Linux.”

That sounds like interesting work. I imagine you get to hear a lot of important stories.

[Tod Hopkins] ” Historically such an exhibit would run on Windows, but Windows has always been hard to keep stable in fixed exhibits and Windows 10 introduced new problems for which no one had solutions, so we decided to work with Linux.

The scales may have tipped in favor of Linux for long-term fixed installations like this, but the jury is still out. I am not entirely happy with the performance of the h.264 video in the application (Unity Media Player). Playing in VLC or Ubuntu looks fine. Within the app we are dropping some frames. It’s a bit of a puzzle why UMP is not working as well as VLC or Ubuntu since all the apps leverage FFMPEG. “

What a pain. Getting players and supposedly standard video formats to behave across different platforms is one of the reasons I don’t miss multimedia work so much. ☺

Shawn

[Richard Mazikowski]

I have to admit that one of the aspect of Windows updates through the years was the need to make it backwards compatible. It meant that their operating system was alway weakened by their desire to never alienate older hardware systems. Apple has always excelled at this even though it meant leaving some out in the cold. Since they were primarily a hardware company it made since.

But, this is really a bit too far especially when you are considering a codec like Animation which it not only widespread but the default codec in many apple programs. They should at least have a way to rewrap it in the background to make it compatible.

[Tod Hopkins]

Jon Chappel of Digital Rebellion wrote one of the simplest and clearest posts on this subject that I’ve read.

https://www.digitalrebellion.com/blog/posts/thoughts_on_32_bit_codecs_being_phased_out_in_macos

Cheers,
Tod

Tod Hopkins
Hillmann & Carr Inc.
Washington, DC